Imagine a US Army force of 13,500 soldiers, cornered by a much larger enemy force, on the other side of the world. What should we do to rescue them? Is there any cost too high to pay to get those Americans out of the way of the enemy buzz saw?

In Syria the Turkish army is moving into terrain controlled by Kurds: begin with this – what’s happening to the Kurds is horribly tragic. And it’s been going on for a long time. Kurds claim descent from the Medes (who took their name from Medus, son of Medea, after her marriage to King Aeetes of Athens (he of Jason and the Argonauts)), and since being conquered by Cyrus the Great in 549 BC they’ve spent most of the last 2500 years being ruled by someone else (Saladin’s dynasty being a notable exception.)

That was supposed to end after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire nearly 100 years ago, but the Treaty of Sevres – which addressed that collapse – was in large part ignored by the Turks, who occupied SE Turkey and much of the land the Kurds wanted. There’ve been numerous attempts by the Kurds during the last 100 years to stake out some sort of state; several ended quite bloodily – in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Long and short, there were and are simply too few Kurds versus too many others, and no one else is going to fight for Kurdish independence.

And, after oil was found in both NW Iran and NE Iraq (Iraqi Kurdistan is the core of any possible Kurd state), the likelihood of the Kurds achieving independence from Iraq or Iran shrank to zero.
US involvement in Syria began during the Obama administration (September 2014). What was the US aim? Destroy ISIS and eliminate the Islamic State. That state is gone, and ISIS has been severally reduced. No one was under any serious delusion that eliminating ISIS would change the rest of the equation: either ISIS will spring up somewhere else (as with al Qaeda), or another group will rise, claiming to be “heirs” of ISIS. In that sense we’re in for a long problem, no matter what we do.

No one relishes abandoning the Kurds; but arguments that: “the Kurds were fighting for US interests” are false: the Kurds are, were, and have been for nearly 2500 years, fighting for their own interests.

What about building a nation over the ruins of this or that war zone? After World War II and the Marshall plan we rebuilt Europe and Japan and they became Western liberal democracies (liberal in the classic sense). If we just give it a few more years, maybe a generation, we’re going to see substantive change, we’ll see a democracy emerge in Iraq – and Afghanistan. If we just give them time, in a generation or two we’re going to see a Kurdish William Jennings Bryant campaigning across Mesopotamia.

Maybe not.

We did get rid of the Nazis and the Fascists in Italy. But are the Germans or Italians much changed from the Germans and Italians of, say, 1920? We destroyed the regimes, but we never tried to change the people or culture. In Japan, we hung Prime Minster Tojo and several others. But: What else did we do? And how much did it cost?

A number of years ago I attended a sumo match in downtown Tokyo. Early on in the match the Emperor and Empress of Japan arrived. The match stopped, the Japanese national anthem was played and everyone stood. What happened next however, was not standard fare. Every Japanese man, woman and child turned and looked upon at their emperor in what can only be called reverential adoration. The Japanese people truly love and revere their emperor. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but there’s a lesson to be learned.

Far from being a pawn in the war, Emperor Hirohito played the key leadership role in the lead up to and initiation of war in the 1920s and 1930s, and was a key decision-maker from the first actions in Manchuria in 1931. Yes, we did get the Japanese to change their constitution, to reduce the Emperor to a symbolic role. Of course, to do that we firebombed almost every city, and we did drop two atomic bombs on them. And yet? The Japanese royal family still sits in the royal box, Japan remains Japan, and the Japanese remain Japanese, just as Germans remain Germans. Cities can be leveled, but destroying a culture? That’s hard work.

And yet it’s suggested that Iraq can evolve into a federated state, and Kurds can develop their independence, and that some sort of liberal, democratic process can take firm root. Again, look at the cost we paid in Germany and Japan. Yet, we never tried to change those cultures or societies, even after truly massive, destructive wars.

What exactly do we really think we can accomplish in the Middle East?

What is happening to the Kurds is horrible. But, do we have the ability to prevent it in any meaningful sense? Delay it, perhaps. Prevent it: no.

Do we stay there to defend the Kurds because we gave them an unwritten promise to help them, an open-ended commitment? If so, what of our commitment to Turkey, our NATO Ally? You may not like that (I don’t), but there it is. We also gave our word to the Iraqis that we wouldn’t partition their country, which is the inevitable requirement if we’re to protect the Kurds.

Return to the problem above: 13,500 US soldiers at risk: the Bataan Peninsula, December 1941.
Gen. George Marshal dropped that on brand new Brigadier General Eisenhower. After a few days of study Eisenhower reported there was nothing reasonable to do. In the end, of a US force of 13,500, more than 2,000 were killed, and 11,500 became prisoners. Of those, more than 6,000 died in Japanese POW camps. (And roughly 80,000 Filipino allied troops were also taken prisoner at Bataan; at least 18,000 died in POW camps.)

Some problems are just too hard. Kurd security over the long term is one of them.
We might fix it in the short term by spending several trillion dollars, and several thousand lives, and invade Syria; but when we left – in 5, 10 or 50 years – Syria would still be Syria, Iraq would still be Iraq, Iran would still be Iran, there’d still be a Suni-Shia schism, and Kurds would still be a minority within a minority, unwanted by all.

It will hurt to leave, but sooner or later, we will have to leave. That is what is happening in Syria.

Copyright 2019 Arrias
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